Taos: a basalt, granite, and conglomerate paradise in northern New Mexico

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They say you can tell a lot about a climber by his dog. And if Jay Foley’s German shepherd, Lupita, is any indication, he’s put up a lot of routes.

We’re near Taos, northern New Mexico, on a hot May afternoon — 85 F, blistering for 7,000 feet elevation on a plateau lapping against the Sangre de Cristos (Rockies). The setting’s the Rio Grande Gorge, a 70-mile serpentine fissure — the bottom floor of the world’s second largest rift valley. My wife, Kristin, and I arrived with the photographer Andrew Burr to document this recently exploding cragger’s mecca. A tricultural city in miniature (5,265 in town; 31,398 residents in the county), Taos is surrounded by hundreds of routes and boulder problems — on basalt (the Gorge), volcanic conglomerate (El Rito), and stonker granite (Tres Piedras, Questa Dome), among other places. This is classic Southwestern climbing, a multi-cliff zone that’s also an area of cultural interest.

Foley has brought us to Miners Crag, east facing, 30 meters tall and a quarter-mile long, a two-tiered wall of shattered-looking but solid basalt that twists like taffy, with sinuous cracks and helixing headwalls. In the last year, Foley and his small, core crew of new routesmen have been hard at it, rapping from piñons past stegosaurus plates to drill the upper headwalls, or going ground-up on the lower crag’s appealing cracks to drop in midway anchors and install sport climbs. It’s quiet in the accordion folds, with mostly 5.9, 5.10, and 5.11 faces and arêtes — and then some of Foley’s turbo 5.12s. Two days before, farther north at the crack-lover’s Wild and Scenic area, we saw a black bear swim the river and, in the gloaming, swallows swarming their mud nests. The air is rich with sagebrush, the snowmelt-fed Rio Grande charging through the depths.

Foley shoes up for Claimjumper, 5.10+ edges up iron rock. And that’s when Lupita moves…100 feet away, to watch warily.

“Lupita likes to watch you climb,” Kristin tells Foley. “But from far away.”

Foley laughs. “Too many rocks dropped near her…” he says. “Too many days where it was just me and her when I was pulling off choss. She knows better.” Foley — an ex-Valley boy, guide based out of Arroyo Seco, and a rigger for Hollywood films — is also an avid first ascentionist. (You’ll find his routes at Ko Yao Noi, Thailand, and El Salto, Mexico.) In 2005, he authored his Taos Rock, the area’s first proper guidebook. Its 190 pages detail 311 routes and dozens of boulder problems. Since publication, Foley estimates 220 new rock climbs and dozens more boulder problems have gone up. That’s a blistering pace considering you can probably count active Taos climbers on two hands, and first ascentionists on one.

But that’s the Taos thing — there’s no one here. Even with 30 years of climbing history, 300 days of sunshine, endless stone, and grand motivators like Foley and Bob D’Antonio leading the charge, climbers still don’t “get” Taos.

Taos is quintessential New Mexico — multicultural, eclectic, bizarre, a not entirely frictionless olio of poverty and wealth, all lorded over by a brilliant sun that arcs from behind the sacred Taos Mountain (12,300 feet) before dropping into the sagebrush flats that rip westward across the gorge. Three primary cultures live here — the Native Americans (the Tiwa-speaking, Anasazi-descended residents of Taos Pueblo), Hispanics, and the Anglos — making Taos one of the unique spots in our world. It’s a bit like Jerusalem, and the ubiquitous adobe architecture reflects this singularity — hell, even the McDonald’s is pueblo style.

The Anasazi arrived around 1,000 AD, carving pit houses into the arroyos and streambeds, and then building their pueblo 350 years later. This mud-walled fortress/village, they named “Tua-Tah.” (Ten minutes from town, it’s the oldest continually inhabited community in the United States, and a United Nations World Heritage Society site.) Next came the Spanish in 1,540 AD with Don Hernando de Alvarado, who mistook the pueblo for one of the fabled “Golden Cities of Cibola,” mythical cities of great wealth said to have been founded by Spanish bishops fleeing the Moors 400 years earlier. Against the natives’ occasional resistance, the Europeans staked their claim, putting in place the acequias (waterways) still used to irrigate crops. Then French and American trappers arrived in the early 1800s. The name Taos originates with the Tiwa word ”towih,” for the red willows along the rivers.